vscode-extension-samples VS rainbow-delimiters

changeList: - type: copy from: url: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples.git match: - /l10n-sample output: /l10n-sample to: ./l10n source: git

Trying to follow the your first extension. With javascript, I've also tried this on vscode-minimal-example.

For my extension I wanted an experience similar to the Hashnode AI Editor, so adding commands to the VS Code command palette was not what I was after. What helped me here was the sample extensions directory on GitHub. Their code-actions sample was exactly what I had in mind (and it targets only the markdown files).

Unfortunately I've never used the generator when writing extensions :( However, the extension samples do have several examples (like this one) that have a tsconfig.json and a launch.json that should achieve what you want.

I remember it being difficult to get started. I remember starting by having the autocomplete work with 3 specific words. I think I used this to learn how the lsp works. There are more complicated examples in the root directory https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples/tree/main/lsp-sample

VSCode CodeActions Sample

Not true of most compilers.

Can you design compilers that can do this? Sure, i was at IBM when we did visualage, which could do this in other ways, though not optimally.

Is it common? Not a chance.

Your claim that increasingly more modern languages have semantic highlighting in real time is simply false - most cannot real time semantic highlight even a 100k file on every keystroke. There are a very small number which can, and it's mostly by luck - they fall down on larger files because they have no incrementality. Meanwhile, this is trivial with tree-sitter for all languages because of it's optimality. If you want to see it in action - turn on semantic highlighting for vscode and type fast - most of the time you will lose syntax highlighting because things can't keep up. see, e.g., https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples/issues...

Again, yes, you could make a compiler for every language which supports a mode that does what tree-sitter does. and people could carefully implement parsers/lexers in each of their favorite compilers and languages that support optimal incremental parsing in them. and then pay the cost of integrating 50 language specific ways of transforming these to work with the editor, basically reinventing what tree-sitter already did right. (As per above, the current semantic token and highlighting support does not resolve this).

You seem to really otherwise be complaining that you believe it does always generate correct parsers. Like I said, that seems totally orthogonal to anything about the speed issue, and if that's your real concern, have at it.

After Googling everywhere for how those little gray bastard are called, here's their name : codeLens and are API of VSCode extensions. An excellent example of how to use them is given here. My first codeLens was to open the file. But then I wanted more! Now my extension can create unit tests file when missing, rename them in the filesystem and code, delete them, generate test template, etc...

Official sample extension (Decorator)

I'm a big fan of rainbow-delimiters, available on Melpa.

rainbow-delimiters ( https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters/ ) does this for parenthesis/braces etc but is somewhat bound to the syntax tree of whatever major mode is currently in use, it also scans on a per-character basis, where I'd need to scan for regex.

> Lighting up the active scopes

As you had guessed a little later, there are a few different emacs packages that do this. One of them is "rainbow parentheses" that gives every bracket a different colour (remember that emacs supports lisp, so differentiating between lots of different parentheses is arguably more useful in emacs than any other editor). [0].

Another one is highlight parentheses [1] which highlights all parens that enclose the cursor position, and gives a darker colour to those "further away" from the cursor.

[0] https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters

[1] https://sr.ht/~tsdh/highlight-parentheses.el/

This article is especially interesting to me, as it shows how VS Code still doesn't have the "Emacs nature". Even though I'm a 30-year Emacs user, I do hesitate to recommend it to younger programmers because it's so alien, and VS Code has one of the essential characteristics of Emacs: the extension language and the implementation language are the same. But this article is a great example of how it doesn't — extensions are limited to using an extension API, rather than having full access to the application's internals. Maybe a good thing, if you're a mass-market product worried about malicious extensions. But I'll note that [rainbow-delimiters-mode](https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters/) dates back to 2010, and has never noticeably slowed down loading or display of source files, even in languages with lots of delimiters like Lisp.

Using highlight-parentheses-mode, which is an additional package, helps. There are also show-paren-mode (build in) and rainbow-delimiters (additional package), whose could help there.